How to Become a Digital Nomad – My Exact Steps

Is this it?

This is the way it should be. Call it the American dream, climbing the corporate ladder, call it what you want. From a young age our life’s path is ingrained so deeply into our brains by the repetitious drone of teachers, family and media that we no longer question why we do what we do.

In retrospect, the situation sounds almost comedic. Some guys up in the clouds are sitting around a table full of empty beer cans, falling over themselves laughing about their booze-glazed plans to ‘really screw with them’ this time.

“Okay, okay, I got one. Let’s take all of the young adults, you know, the one’s who don’t know a damn thing but think they know everything? Yeah them.”

“So we take these kids and put them in a young person’s paradise. I’m talking Eden here. It will be like a sensory overload. Tons of beautiful people, no real responsibility or supervision, and a lot of booze!”

“And then, here’s the catch, when they think they are on easy street, you know their guard is down, let’s force them to make a decision that will dictate the next 30+ years of their lives!”

“They’ll be miserable! Oh, this is a good one. Choose your major, son!”

“Oh, and one more thing. Let’s make it all really expensive so they are really stuck! Damn, I’m a genius. Hand me another beer!”

While the situation may sound absurd in retrospect, in practice, in real time, it is so normal that no one questions it. I sure didn’t when I bounded off to college and wound up with a business degree, a miserable job and a mountain of debt.

So what was I to do? Would I be a slave to my 20-year-old decisions for the rest of my adult life?

From 0 to Digital Nomad: A $40 Book and YouTube

I cut the cord. Staring my student loan debt and a job I hated in the face, I gave the proverbial middle finger to those beer-drinking schemers in the clouds. I didn’t know what my next move was, but I knew what my goal was: freedom. I wanted my well being, my future, to hinge not on what some overdressed VP of Operations thought of me, but on what I actually did.

Maybe I had a moment of clarity or maybe I threw a lucky dart, but shortly after leaving my job I decided the path to freedom was forged through technology and specifically the power of the Internet.

Fast forward five years and I now have a sustainable mobile income that has paid off my student loan debt and allowed me to travel the world. I did this all from scratch with almost no technical knowledge to speak of.

Here are the steps I took to completely flip my career path and free myself from the standard corporate ladder:

1) Lay a Foundation: Technology for Dummies

When you are first starting out learning any new skill it is important to be realistic. When I decided to learn to build websites I had to prevent myself from staring at the work of the real professionals and comparing my current skills to theirs. It is overwhelming and unrealistic. It’s okay to use them as inspiration but realize that even they started somewhere. I started with a book.

To learn any skill you first have to learn the fundamentals. Don’t skip this step no matter how elementary it seems. No matter how badly you want to learn all of the cool bells and whistles. You have to build from the ground up, not the other way around.

The best way I’ve found to learn the fundamentals is to get a beginners book. Sure there are tons of resources for absolute beginners online, but often they aren’t well organized and are written by people for whom the fundamentals are second nature. This means they skip things that you absolutely need to know. Instead go out and buy yourself a good introductory book and work all the way through it. Cover to cover. Don’t skip anything, no matter how obvious it may seem.

My book was ‘Head First HTML and CSS‘. It was organized and well thought out. So much so that at times I felt like I was a college student taking a basic arithmetic course. This is what you want. The book was very effective in laying down the foundation for all of the bells and whistles you get to add later.

2) Learn With a Purpose: Build One of Your Crazy Ideas

This is where my method differs from a traditional education. A traditional education will teach you the fundamentals, but the next steps will be to teach you every single other skill you could ever need.

In my opinion this is the wrong method for a two reasons. First, you are likely to get bored. Remember those terrible algebra classes in high school where you’d always ask the teacher to explain when you’d use this in real life? Yeah, this is like that.

Second, you likely don’t have time to waste learning every single thing about your field of choice. If you are serious about this life change, then you’ll be at it for a while and you can pick up the details on the way. So what do you do then?

Actually build something. Take one of your crazy ideas and build it from scratch. You don’t know how to do it yet, but that’s the point. You will learn so much more on the way if you are learning while building than you would if you were just sifting through higher-level books.

But how do you learn how to build your crazy ideas? Where do you even begin? Let me introduce you to my two best friends. You probably already know them. Google and YouTube.

If you make Google and YouTube your friends, they can teach you to build any crazy idea you can come up with. I’ve been at this for five years and I have yet to come across a problem that they can’t figure out for me. Here is exactly how I got started. None of these crazy ideas panned out, but by building them, I’ve learned the skills needed to create a mobile income.

Hopefully, you can see that I didn’t have some divine intervention to learn these skills. I had an idea (usually a stupid one), and I learned how to build it. Yes, it took some time to go through all of the videos, but I didn’t care because I believed in the idea and that made it fun. Again, none of these ideas took off but look what I knew how to do in just a few short months after reading a ‘For Dummies’ book. I could now:

Build an e-commerce website

Work with databases and server side programming

Create a social media website

Those may not mean much to you right now (or in the future), but I can tell you from experience they are marketable skills. Now I could start marketing myself and making money!

3) Get Work That Uses Your New Skills

At this point in the process you have some marketable skills. Hopefully, one of your wild ideas took off and you are already on the path to Digital Nomad. If not then you are like me. None of my ideas took off, so I needed to figure out how to make money off of these new skills.

Friends, Family and Fools

The first method I used for getting work was to announce my availability to anyone who would listen. I contacted the three F’s ( friends, family and fools) to see if anyone needed some web design work done or knew anyone who did.

At this point it is very important to be open with any potential client. Let’s face it, you are new to this, not some seasoned professional. By being upfront about my skills (still learning) and offering a huge discount I was able to get a little bit of work. At this point the experience is more important than the money!

Freelancing Websites

In truth I didn’t utilize this option until much later in the process, but that is only because one of my three F’s clients turned into a full time (remote work) job for two years!

Freelancing websites have many pros and cons but the main benefit for you at this stage is that they offer you with a much broader set of clients. This means more opportunities.

I’m going to be publishing some very detailed information on being successful at freelancing websites in the near future, but here are some tips if you want to get started on your own:

Tips for Online Freelancing Success

Be upfront about your skill level – You can embellish a little, but it is far better to be open about your abilities. It may be harder to get that first job but you are more likely to get a bad review if you lie about your skills from the onset.

Reviews are gold – Focus on good reviews over high paying jobs, especially when you first start out. A handful of good reviews will have clients beating down your doors.

Kill them with customer service – To set yourself apart make sure your best attribute is your service. Even if you aren’t great technically, clients remember the small things. Over communicate and over deliver.

Raise your rates appropriately – At the beginning you will be charging next to nothing for your work. As you collect good reviews and more skills, it is important to raise your rates accordingly. If you have existing clients, tell them that you need to raise your rates, if you’ve been killing them with customer service, they won’t think twice.

Resources for Online Freelancing Success

Wrapping it all up

If you’ve gotten this far, you are well on your way to creating a life that you control. You’ll be able to decide where you work, what you work on, and how much of that work you do. It is a truly liberating experience!

So, what are you waiting for? Join me in this digital nomad lifestyle and we’ll give those beer-drinking schemers up in the clouds something to laugh about!